Selecting objects by name starting with
The following snippet iterates through the objects in the scene and checks if their name matches a prefix. If it does it's added to the list.

objs = [obj for obj in bpy.context.scene.objects if obj.name.startswith("pad")]


If you want to select them, as in selecting them in the scene, then you can do the following for 2.7x:

for obj in bpy.context.scene.objects:
    if obj.name.startswith("pad"):
        obj.select=True


For 2.8:

for obj in bpy.context.scene.objects:
    if obj.name.startswith("pad"):
        obj.select_set(True)


You could also use:

bpy.ops.object.select_pattern(pattern="pad*")